Archive for August 29th, 2011

Have you ever had your hard drive crash? Have you remembered to back everything up? Did you safely stow away your holiday photos from last
Thanksgiving to your flash drive? How about important financial documents? All your e-mails? That’s a lot to lose! We keep much of our entire lives on our computers these days. You’d be awfully angry with yourself, especially if you had two-thirds of your first novel finally written if you’re an author like me. Of course my writing is one thing I always make sure to have copied off-computer!

It’s wise to take precautions to avoid unnecessary disasters.

S.M.A.R.T Technology

Most hard drives come equipped with what’s referred to as S.M.A.R.T, an acronym that stands for Self-monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology. Thanks to this self-monitoring mechanism built into your hard drive, your hard drive has the capability to alert you to any symptoms
(suspicious patterns, disk errors, et al.) that might portend a digital catastrophe, helping you to prepare or possibly avoid a major headache before it occurs. It would be great if you take advantage of your hard drive’s “smarts”- you just need the right utility to work with the S.M.A.R.T technology inside of it.

This intelligent utility communicates with your drive’s S.M.A.R.T hardware, reporting its findings in an intuitive GUI, and it’s easy for any user to understand. No piece of hardware or software is 100% flawless, but a healthy report doesn’t necessarily ensure a hard drive working in perfect
condition, but it can warn you if a hard drive issue is on the horizon so you can be ready for anything.

Various methods and metrics are employed to monitor the health of your hard drive, and you get to control the frequency at which Active checks your drive’s state. Active resides in your system tray with a fly-by that conveys your PC’s current internal temperature as well as its health status
in a simple percentage value. Double-clicking Active’s tray icon will materialize a handsome GUI displaying an analysis of your hard drive’s S.M.A.R.T’s statistics.

If you don’t understand a piece of information, you can highlight a definition and Active will amplify upon it to give you a more concise look at it. Designed to notify you before a hard drive problem arises, Active Smart will tell you certain bits of information, such as “spin up retry count”,
which basically translates to a possible mechanical malfunction within your hard drive. Like any good hard drive utility, you can scan your hard disks for bad blocks and sectors and it even lets you find information that’s hard to get from Windows alone. Download the basic version, take it for a test drive, and if you decide you like it, purchase the Pro version for $24 USD for even more features and options.

They even have a couple of options for getting a free key free! This is definitely a good deal that compliments the inner workings of your computer.